Bersani Win May Revive Berlusconi and Boost Monti

Italian newspapers ran banner headlines Monday reporting the victory, as expected, of Pierluigi Bersani in a primary election held to select the Democratic Party’s lead candidate for national elections to be held early next year.

Left-leaning La Repubblica even had a page about the inevitable path of Mr.Bersani, a pipe-smoking pragmatist who cites a pope as his hero and calls himself “moderately” in favour of his own ideas, to Palazzo Chigi, the prime ministerial office currently held by Mario Monti.

It may not be so simple.

Italian politics is currently, as always, in a state of flux, but one likely outcome of Mr. Bersani’s triumph is that Silvio Berlusconi could rejoin the fray.

Mr. Berlusconi has always loved depicting his adversaries as communists, and Mr. Bersani was a member of the Italian Communist Party, which began a series of names changes in the early 1990s leading to the Democratic Party today.

Not that the media magnate has any chance of winning the vote and returning to haunt Europe’s political scene with his impish antics. A recent poll showed that almost half of his own People of Liberty party’s voters don’t want him to run.

But the others? A poll published Sunday by ISPO in Corriere della Sera found that internal division could benefit the center-right. In short, if the People of Liberty and a new list led by Mr. Berlusconi both run, they’ll win more votes than if they stay intact.

That won’t be enough to produce a winning coalition, but it would likely chip away at the Democratic Party, which surged to 30% in an SWG poll of voters’ intention late last week.

And that would be enough to assure that the spring election doesn’t produce a winner – a condition more or less set down by Mr. Monti as a requirement for him serving a second term.

Much depends on how Mr. Bersani and his defeated challenger, Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence who ran on a middle-class platform of generational change, cooperate from here.

The former boy scout won accolades for his classy concession speech late Sunday. Allies of Mr. Bersani, meanwhile, including some singled out by Mr. Renzi were quickly busy nominating each other for eventual ministerial positions.

With an unusual 41% of voters saying they are undecided, and with a protest movement led by comic Beppe Grillo polling 20%, Mr. Bersani’s victory could prove Pyrrhic.